27. CHAPTER XXVII.

I CREPT to their doors and listened; they was snoring. So I tiptoed along,
and got down stairs all right. There warn't a sound anywheres. I peeped
through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that was watching
the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was open into the
parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in both rooms.
I passed along, and the parlor door was open; but I see there warn't nobody
in there but the remainders of Peter; so I shoved on by; but the front door
was locked, and the key wasn't there. Just then I heard somebody coming
down the stairs, back behind me. I run in the parlor and took a swift look
around, and the only place I see to hide the bag was in the coffin. The lid
was shoved along about a foot, showing the dead man's face down in there,
with a wet cloth over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-bag in
under the lid, just down beyond where his hands was crossed, which made me
creep, they was so cold, and then I run back across the room and in behind
the door.

The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to the coffin, very soft, and
kneeled down and looked in; then she put up her handkerchief, and I see she
begun to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was to me. I slid
out, and as I passed the dining-room I thought I'd make sure them watchers
hadn't seen me; so I looked through the crack, and everything was all
right. They hadn't stirred.

I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing playing
out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much resk about
it. Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right; because when we get
down the river a hundred mile or two I could write back to Mary Jane, and
she could dig him up again and get it; but that ain't the thing that's going
to happen; the thing that's going to happen is, the money 'll be found when
they come to screw on the lid. Then the king 'll get it again, and it 'll
be a long day before he gives anybody another chance to smouch it from him.
Of course I WANTED to slide down and get it out of there, but I dasn't try
it. Every minute it was getting earlier now, and pretty soon some of them
watchers would begin to stir, and I might get catched -­ catched with six
thousand dollars in my hands that nobody hadn't hired me to take care of. I
don't wish to be mixed up in no such business as that, I says to myself.